Social mobility has stalled which is why politicians are so keen to persuade us we're all middle class
In Georgian times, Jane Austen's family lived an impecunious life, on £210 a year, better off than 95% of the population but treated as "the middle ranks" – so richer than most but not as wealthy as the few.
Today, who or what constitutes the middle class is even more confusing since, by income, the middle (as in median) means around £26,000 a year, not nearly enough to buy a middle-class standard of living. However, it is certainly sufficient to be told by Labour, last week, that as an "affluent" sector of society it may lose its "free perks" (ie paid for by a lifetime of taxes) in retirement, such as bus passes and winter fuel allowances.
Who pays for what is obviously an issue; the poorest must receive most, the wealthiest foot the largest bill. But the middle class is not the monolith that politicians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is diverse and increasingly diffuse, as much a sprawling shanty town as a gravel-drive corner of detached suburbia.
Among its ranks, to name only a few of its variations, are public school paupers with family trees dripping with profligacy, first-generation graduates keeping several poorer relatives afloat and the more traditional middle-class model, personified in Brief Encounter, recipients of wealth cascading down the generations and, until 2008, at least, insured against insecurity.
A guide to this segment of society, The Middle Class ABC: A Loo Book written by Fi Cotter Craig and Zebedee Helm is published later this month. The irony of their long list of must-haves for Middleton aspirants – including chorizo, Jamie Oliver, trampolines, boxed sets and Center Parcs – is that they are also very much a staple of many of the working class. So what's going on?
One reason why politicians of all persuasions are keen to persuade us that we are all middle class now is that they have no choice. Social mobility has stalled. If the working class is unable to move up the next rung of the ladder, then the middle classes, in certain tastes at least, will move down and colonise the accoutrements of working-class life. Tattoos and Tesco prices are welcome in Waitrose.
Except that, arguably, large sections of the working class have no wish to be colonised. They have values and aspirations – resilience, community and ways of being – that have their own validity. Somehow, in the last few years, to be working class has become almost a matter of shame.
Admittedly, the nastier side of capitalism has stripped individual members of many of their assets, trades and skills and put barriers in the way, for instance, of a lifelong love of culture and learning, for its own sake, not for social advancement. Jennie Lee in Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes describes this traditional appetite for learning as "armour buckled around us so we could meet in fair fight all who stood in our way… that fight to build a self-confident working class".
A strong working-class identity still matters to many. It seems deeply unfair that now as co-opted members of the all-embracing middle class, some will face an even tougher retirement if "perks" are withdrawn. That's a high price to pay for a counterfeit version of social mobility.
